Scientific Method
by Ilanala
Summary: The only conclusion he could come to was that his reasonable, ordered, comprehensible world no longer existed." -- Baltar tries to make sense of life after the Cylon attack.


For Gaius Baltar, life had always been simple, sensible. He was a genius, by all accounts, so he became rich and famous. He was devilishly handsome and charming, so he never lacked for gorgeous women eager to warm his bed (or couch or floor or whatever surface happened to be convenient at the time). If hard-working, intelligent people were held back in his shadow, or if husbands or boyfriends or girlfriends had their hearts broken, well, that was the way of the world.

There was a logic to it that his scientific mind appreciated. People got what they deserved, and that was all there was to it. He never doubted for a moment that he deserved everything he had, and he was too self-absorbed to ever consider that others might deserve better from him, or from the world in general.

But for him, as for many people, the world turned upside down when the Cylons attacked. Or, rather, immediately before the Cylon attack when his...not girlfriend, which was such a childish word; not lover, which would imply that their relationship was based on more than sex and occasional help with computer programming—well, the woman he had been seeing on a regular basis for the last two years revealed that she was not, in fact, a woman, and that he had unwittingly helped her render the Colonies utterly defenseless against the Cylon assault.

After that, his world ceased to be logical and rational. It was as though the laws of physics had suddenly changed, not just reversing themselves in easy to follow ways, but completely transforming. Suddenly, atoms were held together by gravity and force was equal to mass times velocity and Schrödinger's cat was definitely dead and he could no longer make sense of anything. People might not be people, the woman before him might not be real, and the existence of one or many gods might not be as ridiculous as he had always thought.

He couldn't understand it. He was used to mathematical certainties and phenomena that could be explained by logic even if the scientific community hadn't yet determined how. He could have explained his personal Cylon as an incredibly vivid recurring hallucination or the result of some kind of chip implanted in his brain, but a hallucination would not have been able to appear to others and then disappear with hardly a trace. He could have perhaps explained his ability to pinpoint the exact location of something in a Cylon compound by an utterly random guess as an amazing stroke of luck, but no one was that lucky. The only conclusion he could come to was that his reasonable, ordered, comprehensible world no longer existed.

Beyond that, his certainty that people earned their fates had been shaken. He was too selfish to think that he deserved to be dead for his part in the attack. He had been an unwitting collaborator, and now the fleet needed him to survive. But there was a tiny part of his brain that wasn't too self-absorbed to think about others, that thought it was only sheer dumb luck that had allowed him and the others to live on while billions of people had died. Their civilization had been guilty of complacency and arrogance, but they had done nothing to deserve near-annihilation. There was no sense in obliterating twelve planets' worth of people for the crime of wanting life to be easier.

He thought, sometimes, in moments of introspective clarity, that he had gone mad. Geniuses were supposedly more prone to madness than ordinary people, so it wouldn't be surprising for a great mind like his to fall into insanity. Perhaps the Cylon attack and this ragtag fleet and everyone in it were all figments of a diseased mind. The world still made sense; it was only that he could no longer understand it, which would provide some small comfort. But the truth was, he had never had a great deal of imagination; he could not have dreamed all of this up.

Failing that, perhaps the universe had gone crazy along with him. That, at least, made sense; as Gaius Baltar goes, so goes the universe. After all, madness was little more than the absence of reason and logic, and everything he had observed in the last few months seemed to lead to the conclusion that such concepts were no longer relevant. Except how could the universe go mad? Laws and rules didn't just change on their own; there had to be some reason.

Perhaps there was an explanation. All he needed to do was change one fundamental assumption and all his observations, all his theories could make sense again. He had assumed that, because the existence of such a being or beings could not be proven, gods did not exist. He liked it that way because it meant he had power over his own fate. But in believing that, he had forgotten one of the basic rules of science: lack of proof doesn't indicate that a theory is false. And now that all evidence appeared to support the existence of a god after all, it seemed it was time to revise his beliefs.

It was that simple, in the end. That was all it would take to right the world and even keep his ego intact. He only had to believe in God, and everything would be well again.

_There is a God, _he thought. _He has a plan I can't yet see, for me and the other humans and even the Cylons. He is judging my people for our sins, and guiding us along a path known only to him. And I..._

_I am an instrument of God._


End file.
